During the past five years, web portals, which provide access to a variety of applications and content through a single location have become increasingly popular. Whereas web portals and pages have historically been used only for basic information presentation to remote users, they have more recently become a platform providing more complicated information delivery tasks both remotely and within organizations. For example, portals have begun to be used to provide a number of organizational and human resource functions within institutions such as universities and large businesses. Thus, informational applications, which were once the province of customized databases, are now being delivered through web portals and pages.
However, current implementations of user information delivery are still lacking in their efficacy. Often the interface and functional components are coupled, making expansion and modification difficult.
What is needed is a more flexible mechanism for configuring a document.